Android's rise caught on video

Android certainly has come a long way in three short years. From those early days of the T-Mobile G1 and our first sample of Google's sweet tooth with the Android 1.5 Cupcake, things have certainly changed.

Today we have two versions of Gingerbread, plus Honeycomb, and Google's mobile OS dominated Mobile World Congress from wall to wall.

But why settle for words when you can relive Android's expansion in video form. Android Community has put together a global activation map video timeline for the platform, and it makes for fascinating viewing.

Watching the timeline it's interesting to see just how long it took Android to really start taking hold, and where the biggest spikes in activation occurred.

The G1 will certainly go down in history as the device that brought Android to the world, but it certainly won't be remembered as one of the best phones the world as ever known, and the video shows just how limited its impact actually was.

What with HTC having been so heavily involved in Android's early development – the G1 itself was manufactured by the Taiwanese firm, and was followed by the likes of the Hero and Dream – you'd expect the biggest spikes to have centred around the release of some of those handsets.

But instead it was the launch of the Motorola Droid – or the Milestone as it was known in the UK – that saw Android's biggest activation spike by far, while the Samsung Galaxy S also had an impressive impact.

With so many Android handsets already on the market today, we're unlikely to see those kind of dramatic spikes again, but we imagine that with 350,000 new Android devices being activated every day as it is, Google won't mind too much.